Review of A. P. Peabody's Positive Philosophy [From North American Review 106.1 (January 1868): 285-294.] ³⁷

2. — The Positive Philosophy. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Amherst College, July 9, 1867, and before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of the University of Vermont, August 6, 1867. By A. P. Peabody, D.D., LL. D., Preacher to the University, and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in Harvard College. Boston: Gould and Lincoln. 1867. 8vo pamphlet.

Under the comprehensive name of positivism, a great variety of philosophical opinions are popularly designated at the present day. Authors who differ as fundamentally as Mill and Spencer, neither professing to be a follower of M. Comte, and one, Mr. Spencer, differing from Comte in almost every essential of doctrine, and openly repudiating the name, are now commonly called “positivists.” It is this enlarged and now generally adopted meaning of “positivism,” as synonymous

with one of the two fundamental divisions of the philosophical world, that our author appears to propose as the subject of his discourse. He discriminates none of its varieties, and imputes some opinions to all positivists which only a few really hold, and some which are held by none of them.

The process by which the word “positivism” has acquired its present signification is in itself an instructive lesson in philosophy. At first assumed as the distinctive name of the philosophy of M. Comte, it has since degenerated, through the vagueness of apprehension and the ignorance of its opponents, into a general appellation, as truly applicable to M. Comte’s predecessors as to his followers, or to any later thinkers of a similar mental character.

But though this name specifically belongs only to M. Comte and his few avowed followers, and is usually applied to other thinkers only by their opponents, yet, as thus generalized, it has a well-accredited and important significance. All positivists, so called, are agreed in regarding the methods of discovering truth exemplified in the maturest of the modern sciences, as the methods of all true knowledge, namely, the methods of induction from the facts of particular observations, and are agreed in ignoring all problems as idle and foolish which cannot receive such solutions.

Among these problems is that of metaphysical causation, the question of those real connections between phenomena as causes and effects which are independent of our experiences, and the invariable and unconditional sequences among them. To those who have reached the positive mode of thought, the word “cause” simply signifies the phenomena, or the state of facts which precede the event to be explained, — which make it exist, in the only sense in which an event can clearly be supposed to be made to exist, namely, by affording the conditions of the rule of its occurrence. But with those who have not yet attained to this clear and simple conception of cause a vague but familiar feeling prevails, which makes this conception seem very inadequate to express their idea of the reality of causation. Such thinkers feel that they know something more in causation than the mere succession, however simple and invariable this may be. The real efficiency of a cause, that which makes its effect to exist absolutely, seems, at least in regard to their own volitions, to be known to them immediately. Causation, among such remote and unfamiliar phenomena as the positions and movements of the heavenly bodies, may be only known by observation and the discovery of the rules of their simple and invariable sequences; yet the mind inevitably imputes to such successions real though unobserved connections, like those it believes itself to know absolutely and immediately in its own volitions.

Not only the positive philosophy, in its widest sense, but also the critical philosophy of Kant, and all so-called sceptical philosophies, deny such an immediate knowledge by the mind of the causal efficiency of its own volitions. That certain mental states of thought, feeling, and desire, of which we are conscious, are followed by certain external effects, which we observe, is to the sceptical schools a simple fact of observation. These thinkers extend the method of the more precisely known to the interpretation of what is less precisely known, interpreting the phenomena of self-consciousness by the methods of physical science, instead of interpreting physical phenomena by the crudities of the least perfect, though most familiar of all observations, the phenomena of volition. So obviously unphilosophical is the latter course, that the acutest of orthodox thinkers (Mr. Mansel, for example) regard the efficiency of cause to be immediately known, not between the internal motive and the external act of volition, but between the will, pure and simple, and its special determinations of the strengths of motives to action, which alone are properly ascribed to the will as an absolutely known cause. That u the strongest motive prevails in volition” is not merely true, but a truism, say these thinkers; “but the strength of the motive is an effect, not the cause of volition. Motives are phenomena of willing, not the efficient Will itself. The connection between the strongest or prevailing motive and its external effect may be merely one of sequence in observation, but this only removes the immediate intuition of causation one step farther back. The real nisus, immediately known, is between the Will and the motives through which it determines external actions. That the same motives, acting under the same external circumstances, are followed by the same external actions may be a matter of mere observation, and may afford no immediate evidence of real causal efficiency. The analogy which makes us infer real efficiency wherever phenomenal regularity is observed is not, consequently, invalidated by the fact that we do not immediately know the real connections between our desires and our muscular movements.”

All this the positivist may readily admit, and yet validly deny the force of this analogy. Regularity is the essential characteristic of what he regards as causal connections. The invariability of the sequences of phenomena has no point of analogy with the relation of an undetermined, undefined, unclassified, real efficiency to a determinate, definite kind of effect. So long as the will is not phenomenally known as so and so determined to action by definable motives, it bears no analogy whatever to observed causes, or to the relation of regular antecedents to their consequents. If it be said that, in one case the connection between cause and effect is known independently of any regularity, while

in the other case it is known only by regularity; or that in the first case the connection is known immediately to be real or causal, and in the other is inferred to be real or causal by analogy; the cogency of the reasoning will depend on whether the connections compared be alike in other respects, except the methods by which they are known. If phenomena succeeding one another, apparently at random, without rule or reason, can be known to be really connected, then analogy ought to infer that all such successions, the most irregular in nature, are connected by causation. But science discovers causation only in regularity. The exact application of the analogy would justify, indeed, what science condemns,— superstitious beliefs concerning signs and portents, the post hoc ergo propter hoc mode of reasoning of the unscientific mind. Either, then, the use of the word “cause” with which science has familiarized the positive philosopher is a complete misnomer, or else the vague notion of cause as a relation between an undefined, undetermined reality, the will, and a definite determinate effect, the motive, is wholly unphilosophical. In either case, there is no analogy between the laws of nature, as known by science, and free volition.

On account of this ambiguity in the use of the word “cause,” the word itself was reprobated and discarded by Comte, though by a wholly too generous concession to the abuses of the term. Mr. Mill reinstated the word, as validly signifying what science understands by it, namely, the sum of the conditions or antecedent phenomena, which by the laws of nature, material and spiritual, are followed by a determinate effect. If human volitions cannot be included under this formula, then, either we know nothing about their causes, or else the word is used in such a different sense, that there is no analogy between such causes and those causes in nature of which science treats. We are not, “therefore,” as our author says, “by a simple process of generalization, or, as a positivist might say, of classification on the ground of resemblance, compelled to infer that, in the changes which have taken place in the universe, in creation, in paroxysmal revolutions, in the annual and [other] periodical sequences of phenomena, will has been and is the efficient cause.” There is not only no analogy, but a direct contradiction, between a cause which is a determinate phenomenal antecedent, regularly preceding its effect, and the “cause” of changes which conform to no rule, — such as our author’s “paroxysmal revolutions.” Both may exist for aught the positivist pretends to know, but he can discover evidence of only one sort of causes. From observation of his own volitions, he finds that he himself, or his will (the name of the internal unity of thought, feeling, and desiring), is a cause, since certain determinate states of this self are followed regularly by determinate

actions or classes of actions. In this kind of phenomena he finds his earliest and most familiar types of causation, but not the best or clearest; for it is only with vague, ill-defined classes of effects that our earliest knowledge of causation makes us acquainted; and in fact we at length discover that the most familiar cases of causation, the phenomena of volition, are among the most complicated and difficult to analyze of all the phenomena of nature, and must be the latest to be reduced to scientific precision of knowledge.

To this extent thinkers like Comte, Mill, Grote, Buckle, Powell, and Spencer may be said to agree, however widely they may differ on other topics. “In all the natural sciences,” the author says, “an alarmingly large proportion of the younger adepts — many of them men of commanding ability in research and generalization — are already pronounced positivists, and are doing all that man can do to legislate God out of his creation”; for such is our author’s interpretation of the scientific doctrine of universal causation. Not to believe that God is capricious, or to believe that there is no valid evidence of capricious agency in the known universe, or any ground for supposing it, appears to be, according to the view presented in this discourse, legislating God out of his creation! As if the will of God were not as essential to the order of nature as to any supposable disorders, miracles, or “paroxysmal revolutions.” To the scientific apprehension, “will,” in the metaphysical sense of the word, is equally essential, or non-essential, to the existence of all phenomena, regular or irregular, and is equally unknown in all. It would seem, from various expressions of our author, that he believes it is only by the manifestation of a capricious will that God makes himself known and felt, like a froward child.

If the author were opposing the opinions of M. Comte and his most subservient followers merely, his statements of the positions he controverts might be accepted as sufficiently correct; but his expositions of what positivism is are given as the opinions of all who are commonly included under the name of “positivists.” In an account of the “foundation-principles” of positivism, he states as one of them, that “the unbroken series of physical antecedents and consequents embraces all nature and all being, so that there is no room for the action of moral or spiritual causes.” It is surprising that the author can seriously believe that he is here fairly stating the real belief of any one of those he has classed among positivists. Unbroken threads of causation are, it is true, the stuff of which the web of phenomena is woven, but these are not exclusively composed of physical antecedents and consequents, as distinguished from moral or spiritual causes and effects. Principles of conduct, moral and spiritual phenomena, our dispositions and emotions, are

not excluded by any positivist from the threads of causation. But it is possible that the author means by the “action of moral or spiritual causes” their metaphysical efficiency, not merely their regular phenomenal successions; yet equally in this case does he fail to represent the opinion he opposes. For the phenomenal regularity inherent equally in physical, mental, and moral phenomena does no more exclude the real causal efficiency of spiritual powers than it does of material forces. It excludes neither from a possible reality, but includes neither in actual knowledge. When, therefore, Dr. Peabody states next as a tenet of positivism, “that human history could have been written in advance, for all nations and for every individual man, by one who, in the remote past, could have comprehended all the material [!] phenomena then in existence, and have followed each out through its series of inevitable consequents”; and when he adds, that “Materialism and Necessity are then the two exponential words of the positive philosophy,” he misinterprets the doctrine he proposes to criticise. The truth is, that neither Materialism nor Necessity (in the sense which the author attaches to this word) are doctrines of positivism; for the one affects to know that spiritual consequents, thoughts, feelings, and desires may follow from antecedents purely material; and the other professes to know the absolute efficiency of causes. But positivism professes to know neither of these. Both transcend its sphere. Within this sphere of observation foreknowledge is believed by the positivist to be possible just in proportion as the mind can attain to a knowledge of the laws and special conditions of phenomena, even to the limit of perfect foreknowledge for all time. But this is not dogmatically asserting the doctrine of Materialism, or that mental phenomena could follow from purely material antecedents. It is a wholly distinct thesis.

Dr. Peabody closes his summary exposition of the “foundation-principles” of positive philosophy with these words: “Its only God is collective humanity; its only allegiance and worship are due to this abstraction, — the sole abstraction admitted in the dreary realm of phenomena.” Humanity is indeed an abstract term, though frequently used to denote the concrete manifold object, “all human beings,” and it is apparently used above in this concrete sense. If not, it would have been more correct to say that the God of the positivists (meaning only Comte and the professors of his religion) is the whole human race, including its past, its present, and its future. Now this is very far from being an abstraction, — is quite concrete.

Our author makes one exception to his sweeping imputations of opinion. He says: “I ought, however, to say that Mill, at this point dissenting from Comte, superciliously permits God to be, nay, grants

that he may possibly have originated the order of nature; but the Supreme Being is left in existence only with the proviso that he abdicate his sceptre, adhere to fixed laws, and abjure the right of providentially modifying those laws, — a God shorn of his godhead, otiose, powerless, — a mute and motionless figure-head, erected by philosophy to save itself from the stigma of atheism.” It is almost needless for us to say to the intelligent reader, that nothing could be conceived more remote than this from the spirit of Mr. Mill’s real opinions. The true positivist regards the existence of regularity — even the universality of causation—in the phenomena of nature as no proof whatever of Necessity or Fate. He knows nothing of what must be absolutely and in all possible worlds, for his principles are all derived from experience of this actual one. No more can he suppose, as our author does, that an apparent absence of law is a proof of free-will. Either hypothesis is perfectly consistent with the constitution of the universe, which science presumes and has in great measure disclosed. Either an immovable Fate or an unvarying Will is consistent with the discovered laws, and the presumed universal order of nature. The inmost nature of neither can be known to human faculties; nor, indeed, whether they are really unlike, except in their phenomenal manifestations. Will is manifested by thought, feeling, and desire, and their truly distinctive external effects. Fate, if there be such a nature, would be manifested, not by an unchanging, but by an unchangeable order in phenomena, both material and spiritual. Positivism, therefore, holds that science, in discovering the orders of phenomena, and even in presuming that such orders are universal, does not decide anything as to their inmost nature, but only as to what they are in external fact. This is very far from requiring that God “abdicate his sceptre, adhere to fixed laws, and abjure the right,” &c. It is simply and humbly discovering what is, instead of dictating what must be. But by Will our author understands Free-Will, and by Free-Will, caprice.

In opposition to the Comtean doctrine that consciousness cannot be an object to itself, and that self-consciousness means only the consciousness of the effects of the self, which are properly external objects, our author resorts to an argument which, since Kant, has been almost universally discarded. He says: “I believe in the relation of an antecedent and a consequent phenomenon only because I, who perceive the consequent, know that I am the same being who observed the antecedent.” More explicitly the theory is this: I know myself as perceiving the antecedent; I know myself as perceiving the consequent; and I connect the two only by knowing myself independently of them as continuing to exist between them. The simple fact is, that only by the representation

of the remembered antecedent, in conjunction with the observed consequent, am I conscious of myself at all. The word “I” is a meaningless subject, without “content.” Only with the predicates, “I think,” “I feel,” “I will or desire,” or synonymous and cognate ones, does it refer to any fact of experience or observation. The union of the antecedent and the consequent of experience in thought through representation is that “unity of apperception” expressed by “I think.” Our author discards, in his discussion of such points, the technical terms of philosophy, and thereby, we think, misses the facts of the case which these terms were devised to express. He proceeds in this way to a summary discovery of his own free-agency, and then gives further characterizations of the views he opposes. “I indeed act not without motives; and, according to the positive philosophy, motives are always [!] from without,— appreciable material forces, the resultant of which determines my action in this or that direction.” And again: “According to the positive philosophy, however, if I do not yield to what seems the strongest motive, it is because of the presence of still stronger, but less patent motives of the same order, — material forces exterior to myself, — which I do not take into account.” This is not the doctrine of any real necessitarian, or positivist. It is simply the fatuous fancy of ignorant barbarians, those Oriental visionaries who call themselves Fatalists. The author objects to it chiefly on account of “the clear consciousness of merit or demerit connected with my action.” Most other writers object to it for the palpable folly there is in supposing that feelings and desires, the causes of volition, (however regularly determined,) can be “material forces exterior to myself.”

Mr. Mill, in his “System of Logic,” distinctly and emphatically disavows that interpretation of the necessitarian’s doctrine, which our author here charges against him in common with all positivists.

We will give but one other instance of our author’s philosophy. He says: —

“Geology leaves us no reason to doubt that, in the earlier history of our planet, the most momentous paroxysmal changes have occurred. It carries us back to epochs at which there were no traces of organized being, and thus renders it certain that there has been creation, — if not creation out of nothing, the shaping, in time, of pre-existent materials. We have prima facie reasons for believing that there has been creation of separate species. Especially is the positivist bound on his own principles to maintain this; for it is not pretended that the transmutation of one species into another, still less of one order into another, has ever been observed or proved in a single instance.”

But is it pretended, as it should be to complete this argument, that

separate creation “has ever been observed or proved in a single instance”? A beginning of life on the earth, recent compared to the earth’s own duration, has perhaps been proved by geology, though hardly so conclusively as our author imagines, most of the evidence being merely negative. But, granting this beginning of organic life as a reasonable hypothesis, how does this prove the “creation of separate species”? And why may not the positivist be allowed the transmutation theory in lieu of this uncertainty, even though he cannot make out a complete case of the transmutation of one species into another? Partial, even very considerable, changes are effected in species by selective breeding and horticulture; and it is upon such facts of observation that the later transmutationists base their hypothesis by one of the best instances, in all scientific speculation, of the application of the positivists’ rules of legitimate hypothesis. Besides, this hypothesis does not profess to explain the absolute origin of life, but only those changes in its manifestations revealed by the geological record. No one is “bound” (least of all, a positivist) “to maintain” any hypothesis to the exclusion of any other, until it is proved to be true; whether it be the hypothesis of the separate creation, or of the transmutation of species. But here our author abruptly shifts his ground. He says: —

“But, in addition to, and often in modification of, the avowed fundamental maxim of the positive philosophy, — ‘Observed phenomena are the only objects of knowledge,’ — its disciples recognize another maxim, — a lex non scripta, yet none the less imperative, — ‘Whatever is impious is true,’ — whatever tends to chase the conception of God from the universe is so antecedently probable that it may be affirmed, even independently of observation.”

It would appear to be our author’s belief, many times indicated in this discourse, though nowhere explicitly laid down, that whatever conforms to law, or is regular and according to the general analogy of nature, “tends to chase the conception of God from the universe”; so that, as science understands truth, the converse of the above lex non scripta would appear to be its just rendering; namely, that “Whatever is true is impious.” Indeed, history affords many notable particular confirmations of this rule in the judgments of religious teachers on true hypotheses in science. Our author appears to base Theism on exceedingly narrow and precarious grounds in experience, and we could easily imagine a positivist with a much more rational faith in it.

The conception of a Being with a nature akin to our own, but perfect in all that we aspire to be; infinite in power, with perfect goodness and knowledge; who does not “providentially modify” the laws of his universe, since no laws can be supposed more wisely adapted to his own highest ends; whose will is just as immediately manifested in the

order of nature as in any supposable miracle, — such a conception is to many thinkers, who are called positivists, a most cheering and inspiring one, and is not inconsistent with anything which hitman science has yet disclosed, or is ever likely to discover.

Enlightened faith in the truth of such a conception is founded on the sentiments it appeals to. It does not demand as the condition of assent the force of irresistible demonstration; nor does it deceive itself with fallacious arguments.